“If you need to invoke your academic pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument.”

The day that you stop looking – because you’re content God did it – I don’t need you in the lab. You’re useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.

As areas of knowledge grow, so too do the perimeters of ignorance.

Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what’s really there.

Somehow it’s O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, ‘I never learned to read,’ they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.

Curiously, light-loving green plants reject the Sun’s green light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look green.

Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.

We live in a world where not everyone has the urge to help others. It is OK to encourage others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but if you do, just remember that some people have no boots.

We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.

I don’t want people to say, ‘Something is true because Tyson says it is true.’ That’s not critical thinking.

Facts are true whether or not you believe them.

Why can’t we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What’s our excuse?

The molecules that comprise our body are traceable to the crucibles of the centers of stars.These atoms and molecules are in us because, in fact, the universe is in us. And, we are not only figuratively, but literally, stardust.

What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind through the universe? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

What I’m saying is, when different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to your opinion. That’s the good thing about science: It’s true whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works.

When students cheat on exams, it’s because our school system values grades more than students value learning.

I just decided that I didn’t want to be in the academic world, because it was [really] too easy for me at the top. But also it wasn’t active enough for me.

While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.

Sovereignty and the right to rule cannot be conferred on anyone no matter who … as a result of an academic discussion. Sovereignty is acquired by force and power and violence.

There were a lot of people who were willing to write a letter for me. Not because I was academically inclined, but because I worked hard.

(The discovery of penicillin) was a triumph of accident, a fortunate occurrence which happened while I was working on a purely academic bacteriological problem.

I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.